State native John Doar, lawyer who battled segregation, dies at 92

James Meredith, back center, is escorted by John Doar (not wearing a helmet) and federal marshals as he appears for his first day of class at the previously all-white University of Mississippi, in Oxford, Miss., on October 1, 1962. Doar, a Wisconsin native and the lead federal lawyer fighting segregation in the South, died Tuesday at age 92.

John Doar, who was a leader in the federal government's legal efforts to dismantle segregation in the South during the most volatile period of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and who returned to government service in the 1970s to lead the team that made the constitutional case for the possible impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Doar, who grew up in New Richmond, Wis., prosecuted some of the most notorious cases of murder and violence in the South in the 1960s and was instrumental in changing the region's pattern of race-based politics based on voter discrimination. In 1974, Doar, a Republican, was named chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

Doar rode with the Freedom Riders across Alabama in 1961.

As the chief lawyer for the Justice Department's civil rights division, he was heavily involved in the investigation of the murder of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Seventeen men went on trial in 1967 in federal court in Meridian, Miss., charged under a 19th-century federal law with violating the civil rights of the victims, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

Doar and the prosecution team drew on confessions and the testimony of paid informers who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. Seven, including a deputy sheriff and the state head of the Klan, were convicted and sentenced to terms of three to 10 years each.

In 1965, he unobtrusively led the federal presence at the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. He prosecuted three Klansmen who murdered a white volunteer, Viola Liuzzo, on the last night of that march, and they were sentenced to the maximum of 10 years in prison by a federal judge. Doar successfully argued for a precedent-setting application of the old federal civil rights law in the killings after Alabama juries in a state court refused to convict them of murder.

Doar repeatedly put his life in danger but was never harmed.

He and a federal marshal escorted James Meredith when he integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. Meredith's presence there touched off a riot that killed two men and left 160 marshals wounded. While the riot raged outside, Doar spent the night in Meredith's dormitory room, and he lived with Meredith for several weeks.

Doar was chosen for a leading role in the Watergate investigation in the 1970s because of his credentials as a loyal Republican — a "Lincoln Republican," he called himself — whose straight-arrow reputation guaranteed his impartiality. The investigation ended with Nixon's resignation.

During the Watergate inquiry, Doar kept his customary low profile. He never appeared on television or wrote a book about the experience.